“Metamorphoses” – Ovid, 102
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Category: poems to ponder
April 3, 2020
“Metamorphoses” – Ovid, 101
“Primavera“ (1478)
Sandro Botticelli
_________
a friend expressed some interest in Ovid’s
Metamorphoses recently after I’d sung for
a few moments its praises, had told her I
was revisiting it after some time with the
intention of duly, this time, completing it,
given that, hey, we’ve got lots of time, at
present, all of us, on our hands, by very
mandate
it sounds wonderful, she briefed me after
I’d sent her the appropriate link, but there
are some parts I don’t understand
I’ll help, I said, only too eager to share
the delights of this inprobable treasure,
a gift nearly two thousand years old,
with the magic still of very revelation
Metamorphoses is a creation story, the
equivalent of the Bible for those who
revered the Roman deities, the same
deities that the Greeks revered, but
transplanted, renamed, to Roman
stock, like the Puritans did their
Christian seed at Plymouth Rock
Ovid, 43 BC to 17/18 AD, was a Roman
poet, paying fealty to Augustus, Emperor
of Rome, 63 BC to 14 AD, therefore his
Roman goddesses, gods, and his,
contemporary, Latin
which was translated into English early
in the Renaissance, but found its best
expression, to my mind still, in the
eminent hands of Sir Samuel Garth,
John Dryden, Alexander Pope, Joseph
Addison, William Congreve, among
others in, already, 1717
listen
The Creation of the World
Of bodies chang’d to various forms, I sing:
Ovid is saying my topic is transformation, very
metamorphoses, plural of metamorphosis
Ye Gods, from whom these miracles did spring,
Inspire my numbers with coelestial heat;
‘Till I my long laborious work compleat:
And add perpetual tenour to my rhimes,
Deduc’d from Nature’s birth, to Caesar’s times.
poets have traditionally called upon their related
muses to inspire them to accomplish their task,
Ovid invokes his Gods, compare Shakespeare’s
O for a Muse of fire, that would ascend / The
brightest heaven of invention, his prologue to
Henry V
“Ye Gods”, Ovid says, “from whom these
miracles did spring”, those everyday wonders
that surround us, inspire me, he asks, that I
might “compleat”, which is to say complete,
his poem, “this long laborious work”
his “numbers” are his years, “coelestial”, or
celestial, “heat”, is inspiration
“tenour to my rimes” means rhythm, weight,
to his poetry
“Nature’s birth”, or the beginning of time, to
“Caesar’s time”, Ovid‘s own period under
Augustus
Ovid asks the Gods to fuel him with the
fire to tell the story of the world from its
very beginning to his own epoch,
Caesar’s
how’s that for a project
enough for now
but stay tuned for, to follow, the Creation,
capital C, I tell you
R ! chard
June 20, 2019
on ego, in particular, mine
“Luncheon in the Studio“ (1868)
Édouard Manet
_________
you think I’ve got a big ego, I asked
a friend who’d just told me I had one,
not confrontationally but as a matter
of fact, I wasn’t offended, just curious,
I think I’m so humble, I answered,
usually, so deferential
she wouldn’t cede to my, to her,
manifestly improbable, argument
what do you call ego, I asked
what the definition is in the dictionary,
she answered, and pulled out her cell
phone to prove it
sure, I said, I know what the dictionary
says, but how does that apply to me
well, just what it says, she said
my mother reads in the paper that it’s
going to rain today, I said, then it
doesn’t, and I retort that only the
weather essentially knows about the
weather, but she still keeps to the
prognostications
one night I said, look, mom, the moon
is full, no, she answered, it’s a quarter
moon, it said so on the calendar, look,
I said again, it’s full, it’s a full moon,
but she wouldn’t believe me, it turned
out she’d been reading the previous
year’s almanac
print gives us Platonic ideals, standards
that we think definitive, I asserted, but
everything is in the eye of the beholder,
words are just approximations, nothing
but meeting places where we toss around
disparate ideas no firmer, nor distinct,
nor assured than conversations among
different languages, miscommunication
can be that wide
my friend tells me just talking like that
is proof of my big ego, but I still don’t
get it, I think I’m so courteous,
fundamentally, so congenial and, you
know, nice, otherwise
R ! chard
June 9, 2019
the conditional
“If Once You Have Slept on an Island“ (1996)
Jamie Wyeth
________
the conditional mood is easy, it always
follows if
if I had a hammer, for instance
or
if I were a rich man
it is not a real event, as Classical
representation would be in art, were I
to make that synesthetic juxtaposition,
which is to say, were I to replace the
visual sense with that of letters, but
rather like Surrealism, for instance,
in that other context, a superimposed
idealization
here’s a poem you’ve probably
already heard, or heard of, through
its final, and epochal, verse, Kipling’s
“If“, a towering instance of moral
suasion on our culture
If you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you,
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,
But make allowance for their doubting too;
If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,
Or being lied about, don’t deal in lies,
Or being hated, don’t give way to hating,
And yet don’t look too good, nor talk too wise:
If you can dream—and not make dreams your master;
If you can think—and not make thoughts your aim;
If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster
And treat those two impostors just the same;
If you can bear to hear the truth you’ve spoken
Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,
Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken,
And stoop and build ’em up with worn-out tools:
If you can make one heap of all your winnings
And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,
And lose, and start again at your beginnings
And never breathe a word about your loss;
If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew
To serve your turn long after they are gone,
And so hold on when there is nothing in you
Except the Will which says to them: ‘Hold on!’
If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,
Or walk with Kings—nor lose the common touch,
If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you,
If all men count with you, but none too much;
If you can fill the unforgiving minute
With sixty seconds’ worth of distance run,
Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it,
And—which is more—you’ll be a Man, my son!
in the spirit of juxtaposition, compare
that to Polonius’ admonition to his son,
Laertes, upon that young colt’s imminent
return to France, where he had earlier
been, reputedly, carousing
Yet here, Laertes! aboard, aboard, for shame!
The wind sits in the shoulder of your sail,
And you are stay’d for. There; my blessing with thee!
And these few precepts in thy memory
See thou character. Give thy thoughts no tongue,
Nor any unproportioned thought his act.
Be thou familiar, but by no means vulgar.
Those friends thou hast, and their adoption tried,
Grapple them to thy soul with hoops of steel;
But do not dull thy palm with entertainment
Of each new-hatch’d, unfledged comrade. Beware
Of entrance to a quarrel, but being in,
Bear’t that the opposed may beware of thee.
Give every man thy ear, but few thy voice;
Take each man’s censure, but reserve thy judgment.
Costly thy habit as thy purse can buy,
But not express’d in fancy; rich, not gaudy;
For the apparel oft proclaims the man,
And they in France of the best rank and station
Are of a most select and generous chief in that.
Neither a borrower nor a lender be;
For loan oft loses both itself and friend,
And borrowing dulls the edge of husbandry.
This above all: to thine ownself be true,
And it must follow, as the night the day,
Thou canst not then be false to any man.
from Shakespeare’s “Hamlet”, act 1, scene 3,
all, incidentally, in the imperative, the mood
of command, authority, however consequential
there, or not
a film called “If…” is also worth visiting
in this context, from the 1970s, with an
iconic soundtrack that gripped the
generation then that heard it, listen,
watch, the Missa Luba, be gripped
R ! chard
February 9, 2019
“a simple story” – R ! chard
“The Book of Time“ (2014)
Nina Tokhtaman Valetova
______________
ferreting through old papers the other
night, I found, in a forgotten corner of
my closet, this poem, I thought it had
some merit
_________
a simple story,
mine.
Like yours,
it has its moments
— passion,
pain,
to each in similar proportions
(I’ve also had a broken heart,
and you are happy too, sometimes) —
moments telling tales, a lot, for me
of this
or that
— and every tale is true, in time,
of everyone —
moments that pass,
one,
and then the next,
just gone,
like that,
and apart from what is here,
right here — this black and white —
this thirtieth day in May,
nineteen seventy-nine,
its 13:48,
then 49,
are gone,
just gone,
like that !
R ! chard
August 22, 2018
Shakespeare = Beethoven, or the reverse
“John Philip Kemble as Hamlet“ (1801)
___________
if I’m to compare Beethoven’s 32nd
Piano Sonata, his opus 111, with
anything else you might be familiar
with, it would be Shakespeare’s
epochal contemplation, “To be, or
not to be“, both are, first, and
briefly, soliloquies, one performer
alone is on stage, both are
implicitly meditations, that will
augur, inspire, note, a new age
let me propound, for a moment, on
the Shakespeare, an introspective
piece set on resolving an existential
dilemma, To be, or not to be, that is
the question, it is pungent, forceful,
arresting, if only even rhythmically,
so much so that many still
pronounce the first line of that
trenchant aria with verily stentorian
conviction, without realizing that the
several concluding movements are
abysmally dire, indeed they
investigate, with improbably literate
fervour, a life and death situation
Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer
The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,
Or to take arms against a sea of troubles
And by opposing end them
should one, after contemplation,
bear the onslaught of life’s most
unacceptable tribulations, or,
most efficiently, cut all of it off
… To die – he says – to sleep,
No more; and by a sleep to say we end
The heart-ache and the thousand natural shocks
That flesh is heir to: ’tis a consummation
Devoutly to be wished
I’ve often been there
... To die, to sleep;
To sleep, perchance to dream – ay, there’s the rub:
the rub, which is to say, the problem,
what’s up once you’ve done yourself
in
For in that sleep of death what dreams may come
When we have shuffled off this mortal coil,
Must give us pause
indeed, there’s the respect, the angle,
the conundrum one must consider
that makes calamity of so long life
one ‘s stuck between the devil and the
deep blue sea
For who would bear the whips and scorns of time,
Th’ oppressor’s wrong, the proud man’s contumely
the demeaning disrespect a proud man ‘s
made to suffer
The pangs of dispriz’d love, the law’s delay,
The insolence of office, and the spurns
That patient merit of the unworthy takes
which is to say, life’s multifarious, and
beleaguering struggles
When he himself might his quietus make
With a bare bodkin?
quietus, silence, extermination
bodkin, a knife
… Who would fardels bear,
fardels, hardships
To grunt and sweat under a weary life,
But that the dread of something after death,
The undiscover’d country, from whose bourn
No traveller returns, puzzles the will,
And makes us rather bear those ills we have
Than fly to others we know not of?
we keep on grunting, in fear that
what comes after could be worse
a man considering his own demise,
his quietus, at the time of Shakespeare
would’ve been, only a generation earlier,
an heretic, one deserving of unforgiving,
and gruesome, censure, Hamlet was,
not incidentally, however, a prince, a
role model, though evidently controversial
but the Reformation had occurred,
a loosening of categorical strictures
in France, Descartes had, in his quest
for the true God, concluded, Cogito,
ergo sum, I think, therefore I am,
eclipsing the Catholic God as the
final arbiter, personal metaphysical
options were up for grabs, out in
the open, though yet not entirely
secular
which would happen, out loud, in
the Age of Reason, when God, as
we knew Him, lost His, by now
scattered, authority, among
Lutherans, for instance, Calvinists,
Anglicans, and a proliferation of
sprouting others, not to mention,
still, the stalwart, ever, Roman
Catholics
the Romantic Period needed a new
ethic, a personal evaluation of one’s
metaphysical position, Beethoven,
in a word, or in his 32nd Piano
Sonata rather, delivers, a piece no
less intense than Shakespeare’s
profound interrogation
briefly, there are two movements
here, merely, which demand your
attention, it isn’t music that one
listens to with just one ear, this
is Jesus on the Mount of Olives,
Gethsemane, not much different
from Shakespeare’s existential
soliloquy
war, peace, rebellion, resignation,
black, white, fast, slow, explosive,
extended, man, woman, yin,
indeed, yang, short, long,
irascible, submissive, all
paradoxical dichotomies, all
eventually, manifestly,
transcendent, all a subjugation,
a private prayer, eventually,
however fraught, however
nevertheless archetypal,
two movements that still
haven’t exhausted their
philosophical potential for
being assuaging, inspirational
R ! chard
September 19, 2017
on Billy Collins – “Safe Travels”
me, May 24, 2016
__________
I save all the New Yorker poems
to read after I’ve been through
everything else in the issue,
like dessert after a meal, icing
on the cake, sometimes too
heavy, sometimes too light,
sometimes too rich, sometimes
just right
today, I found my favourite poem,
period, this year, stepped right
into its shoes, like old slippers,
the only difference being my
walls are painted a variety of
contrasting colours, studded
with memorabilia, treasured
artefacts, see above
also, no one’s translating my
poems, though even our metre
is the same, try it, sing us out
loud, you’ll dance
R ! chard
_____________
Every time Gulliver travels
into another chapter of “Gulliver’s Travels”
I marvel at how well travelled he is
despite his incurable gullibility.
I don’t enjoy travelling anymore
because, for instance,
I still don’t know the difference
between a “bloke” and a “chap.”
And I’m embarrassed
whenever I have to hold out a palm
of loose coins to a cashier
as if I were feeding a pigeon in a park.
Like Proust, I see only trouble
in store if I leave my room,
which is not lined with cork,
only sheets of wallpaper
featuring orange flowers
and little green vines.
Of course, anytime I want
I can travel in my imagination
but only as far as Toronto,
where some graduate students
with goatees and snoods
are translating my poems into Canadian.
__________
psst: I said just recently to a poet
acquaintance that what poetry
needed in the 21st Century is
humour, the only art form not
catching up with the rest,
otherwise it’ll die of, indeed
succumb to, its own
lugubriousness
thank you again, Billy Collins
May 12, 2017
“Tango Lesson” – Lisa Richter
‘El Jaleo‘ (1882)
_________
After a history lesson, crash course in Buenos Aires
a hundred years before our time, we begin
at last. You gently place my arm over yours, my hand
on your shoulder, our bodies distant enough
to have an invisible body between us – this is open embrace,
you explain, abrazo abierto. We dare not dance in abrazo cerrado,
where our chests would nearly touch – I’m not single-
minded enough about learning these moves to unlock
what I fear might spill out, should I let myself fall
into your hazelnut voice – so rich and deep I might never
emerge from it. You teach me the new skill of following,
though your lead feels less like control and more
like stewardship, carving swans of negative space
that stretch their graceful necks along the diagonals
of our bodies. We’re in a conversation of pauses
and advances. I step too soon, but you are eminently patient,
your large hand over mine, poised mid-air, a paper crane
mid-flight. As you shift your weight from side to side,
I wait, trying to sense which way we are going,
and for a moment, I have the chance to look at you not
looking at me, your calm grey eyes fixed above my head.
On the small of my back, your warm hand –
a breathing orchid, cupped flame.
____________
for, especially, Tonyia
the clash of cultures is exposed to the light
here as a tango dancer teaches an English-
speaking novice how to dance
there is no evident metre in the verse, the
poem is in prose, contained within terse,
two-lined stanzas which act as constraints
on the forward flow, however ever fluidly
continuous, like tenutos in music, where
the note is held, dramatically, before a
return to the original rhythm
but slowly this prose develops its own
irresistible rhythms, an abandonment
to the metre of the whole, a languid
surrender to the pulse and propulsion
of the dance, and becomes, despite
its, ahem, flat feet, a poem
the very vocalic construction of
Romantic languages, abrazo abierto,
for instance, or abrazo cerrado,
propelled by vowels for their forward
motion, in imitation of the heartbeat,
preclude in natives unfamiliarity with
cadence, the tango is already in their
blood, the teacher here ineluctably
lives, breathes, hir ethnic identity
Anglo-Saxons and Teutons excel,
rather, at political science and
philosophy, more sober, cerebral
preoccupations, suppressing
gutturally in their glut of gurgled
consonants, the more carnal
allure or, from a primmer
perspective, temptations, of the
senses
which Romantic poets, incidentally,
pointedly sought out in the seductive
rhythms of the Mediterranean, much
as this very student succumbs to the
‘breathing orchid’, the ‘cupped flame‘
of this tantalizing tango
Richard
March 29, 2016
2016, a rumination
“Warning Sign“ (2006)
____
in an introspective moment, I mused
the days move on, the years, it’s
2016, beyond what I could ever
have imagined, born as I was
before even television nearly,
1949, Israel was being invented,
the Geneva Conventions were
being devised
the future had been predicted with
“2001” in 1968, Kubrick’s visionary
masterpiece, if not quite with “1984“,
Orwell’s 1949 attack on imminent,
impending, totalitarianism
though that work was too close to
have significant impact, we still, by
that eponymous date, weren’t at all
aware of possible pervasive
personal monitoring, of even
entirely innocent transactions,
we were busy deregulating,
privatizing, ceding our patrimony
to unscrupulous speculators, that
which our forebears had even died
for, who once had been serfs and
as indentured
Big Brother since has been
identified, verified, and you, we,
are the perpetually espied
we are seduced by the idea that
our innocence will be our salvation,
though innocence, like beauty,
truth, is in the eye of the, not
necessarily impartial, beholder
and the beholder, the monitoring
eye, cannot be impartial
see God
we have ever been at the mercy
of not necessarily Reason, but
inexorable Fate, though prayer,
I’ve found, has worked miracles
it is the only hope we have
I wish you miracles
Richard
Richard
February 5, 2015
“A Year’s Carols” – Algernon Charles Swinburne
__________
happy poems about February are not
easy to find, nor are poems by any
poet written for each month of the
year
but here are Algernon Charles
Swinburne‘s “January” and “February”
from his “A Year’s Carols“
January
Hail, January, that bearest here
On snowbright breasts the babe-faced year
That weeps and trembles to be born.
Hail, maid and mother, strong and bright,
Hooded and cloaked and shod with white,
Whose eyes are stars that match the morn.
Thy forehead braves the storm’s bent bow,
Thy feet enkindle stars of snow.
February
Wan February with weeping cheer,
Whose cold hand guides the youngling year
Down misty roads of mire and rime,
Before thy pale and fitful face
The shrill wind shifts the clouds apace
Through skies the morning scarce may climb.
Thine eyes are thick with heavy tears,
But lit with hopes that light the year’s.
March’ll have to wait
most of us have never even heard of
Swinburne, I actually thought he was
German, he’s not, he was English,
and decadent, apparently, like his
compatriots then, Dante Gabriel
Rossetti and Oscar Wilde, who
thought Swinburne, however, was
a sham
though he never received a Nobel prize,
he was nominated for one in literature
each year from 1903 to 1907, then
again in 1909
to Swinburne
Richard
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